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Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Our Real History

By Hal Herring

“For once the battle is lost, once our natural splendor is
destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with
beauty or wonder at nature his spirit will wither and his sustenance be
wasted…” Lyndon Baines Johnson, The
Great Society, Speech delivered 22 May 1964, Ann Arbor, MI

The cold winds blow, and the lakeshore, once so vibrant with
life, is silent, the sand unmarked by the prints of bare feet. A strange
sadness overtakes the nation and its arts- popular movies, books, television
shows- are about disaster, or chronicles of seemingly normal people who spend
their lives preparing for an unspecified collapse, hoarding guns, ammunition,
bags of rice. Children sit passively, their eyes glued to screens, watching the
increasingly boring creations of adults who themselves sit glued to screens at
their work, battling depression under fluorescent lights. An epidemic of obesity
sweeps both young and old. Seventy-five percent of American
youth are unfit for military service, another unenviable and frightening record
in a world replete with strife. The wealthiest citizens enjoy unprecedented
access to excellent fishing, hunting, and the freedom of open spaces. For the
vast majority though, the nation is becoming smaller, more urban dwellers with
more traffic between them and the countryside, more electronic distractions,
fewer outdoor places to exercise, to build physical skills, or to learn about
the natural world. We are being asked a
profound question about who we are.

In 2014, Congress will have the opportunity to re-authorize
the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and mandate that it be fully stocked to
its intended $900 million per year. A quick history: The Land and Water Conservation
Fund (LWCF) was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, and it was
created from a small portion of the royalties produced by oil and gas
production on the Outer Continental Shelf. It was allocated for $900 million
per year (from total royalties that vary between $5 and $7 billion annually). The
money was to be (and was) distributed to the states for projects focusing on
everything from public tennis courts to protecting watersheds, national parks,
wildlife and fisheries and other natural resources. LWCF would become one of
the world’s greatest conservation success stories, a linchpin of a strategy not
just to preserve natural beauty and resources, but to build an America where
everyone would have access to the best of what our nation offers. The LWCF,
like most of the American legacy of conservation, recently became a target of
extremists in the US House of Representatives.

At any point in our history, we could have chosen to abandon
our dream of a truly exceptional nation, to let the legion of naysayers,
cynics, and scoffers prevail. It would have been so easy. When the Gilded Age was roaring along, the
small cabal of wealthy speculators setting us up for the Panic of 1873, then
the much worse Panic of 1893, which was followed by four long years of dire
economic depression, we could have shrugged and assumed that this was just the
way it was. The bison were gone, most of
the elk, all the passenger pigeons. The plume hunters were exterminating the
last of the exotic birds of the Florida wilderness. Judging by the history of
the places from which we came- Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, this is
what civilization meant- the destruction of the natural world, plutocracy
masquerading as governance.

Uniquely, we refused to view this wrongdoing as inevitable
or permanent. This was the time of our most intense battles over the rights of
labor, farmer’s revolts in the South and the Great Plains, and angry populist
political “fusion” movements led by respected men like “The Great Commoner”
William Jennings Bryan. Great wildlife
conservation movements, almost all of them led by sportsmen, were born. Instead of descending to anarchy, yielding to
the temptations of tyranny, or settling for a nation that could not meet its
grandest promises, we addressed our troubles at town halls and in Congress. The
citizenry demanded solutions and put them to work.

This is our real history, deliberately obscured by the sound
and impotent fury of those determined to solve nothing and who thrive on the
cotton candy of distraction.

In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt introduced what he
called “The Square Deal,” an agreement with the American people based on three
principles: natural resource conservation, reining in the increasingly
destructive corporate powers, and providing protection for consumers by
regulating enterprises such as meatpacking or the rampant drug industries.
Roosevelt used the limited power of government to do only what American
citizens could not be expected to do for themselves- conserve critical natural
resources on the large-scale, break up corporate monopolies that were
perverting the free market, and ensure access to safer foods and more effective
medicines. He was the first President to create a physical fitness test and
standard for the US Marine Corps- ( http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/01/02/marines-female-fitness-pullups/4294313/)
and perhaps the first to truly grasp and cultivate the connection between
public lands and public spaces, the physical and mental health of the citizens,
and their commitment to – and ability to fight for- the nation. Roosevelt summed up his views
more than once, as in these two short sentences delivered to the Deep Waterway
Convention, Memphis, Tennessee, in 1907: “The conservation of natural resources
is the fundamental problem. Unless we solve that problem it will avail us
little to solve all others.”

Those words must have seemed like prophecy thirty years
later, as the dust blotted out the skies of the mid-West, the highways swarmed
with hungry and destitute families, and the souplines in the cities stretched
for blocks. It would fall to another Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, and to the
American people to rebuild the soils, recreate the American economy, and try to
prevent such economic and ecological (the two words would be forever linked in
the minds of anyone who survived the “Dirty Thirties”) catastrophes from
recurring. The years 1933 and 1934 were the lowest points in several dismal
measures- lowest point for American wildlife such as whitetail deer, wild
turkeys and waterfowl, lowest point in the years of the Depression, the beginning of the worst of the Dust Bowl
years that would see 100 million acres of farm and rangeland almost ruined. It
was a time for extraordinary remedies, and we found them, created them, put
them to work.

The American economic boom touched off by the end of the
Second World War came at a tremendous environmental cost to our air and water,
but it also empowered a huge middle class to buy boats and shotguns and fishing
tackle and hiking boots and take to the mountains, lakes and rivers. The
wildlife restorations begun in the 1930’s with such funding sources as the
Pittman-Robertson taxes on firearms and ammunition were bearing fruit. Groups
like Ducks Unlimited (established in 1937) were flourishing as more sportsmen made the connection between
conserved habitat and hunting opportunity. Sporting goods manufacturers were
making a connection between their profits and those opportunities. Trout
Unlimited was founded in 1959 on the Au Sable River in Michigan, by fishermen
who knew they’d have to act on their own behalf to preserve the sport they
loved and the beautiful waters that made it possible.

During the 1950’s and 60’s an outdoors people was
discovering its outdoors on a grand scale. The automobile provided the mobility to travel
to the public lands, to visit the National Parks, to fish and hunt and travel.
It was in essence, a renaissance – the frontier was long gone, but many of the
traditions born there had survived, including fishing, hunting, camping, and
the simple idea that being outside, active and healthy, was an essential part
of American freedom.

The Land and Water Conservation Fund, signed into law by
President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, was a critical and pragmatic part of this
renaissance. Like our early wildlife conservation laws, or the setting aside of
public lands and creation of National Parks, LWCF was a pioneering and
visionary act. In an address to Congress on February 8, 1965, President Johnson
said, "Our conservation must be not just the classic conservation of
protection and development, but a creative conservation of restoration and
innovation. Its concern is not with nature alone, but with the total relation
between man and the world around him. Its object is not just man's welfare but
the dignity of man's spirit."

An engaged citizenry, hunting and fishing public lands,
running beside urban rivers on parklands bought with LWCF money, exploring
swamps and mountain trails, witnessed firsthand the challenges posed by
pollution and the potential pitfalls of a nation where too much land is off
limits to the public. It was a classic formula for positive change - freedom
fosters freedom. People who know what is at stake, who have been exposed to
natural beauty and the healthy rigors of outdoor experience, will always demand
that these resources and opportunities be protected. Beginning about five years after the LWCF was
created, the citizenry demanded, and got, a series of some of the world’s
strongest federal environmental laws. From the Clean Air Act of 1970 through
the Superfund Act of 1980, the US began to slowly reverse the worst of the air
and water pollution in our country.

The legislation worked so well that many people today seem
to have no idea what it is, or what it was created to address. Americans born at the tail end of the Baby
Boom and after grew up with cleaner air and water than their parents
experienced. They had more outdoor recreational opportunities. This was
accomplished even with the tremendous surge in US population- from 191 million
people in 1964 to 317.4 million today.

Unlike most of that world, we turn on the tap in our homes
and drink water that is safe. Air quality is still good in most regions. We
swim in our rivers, eat fish from lakes and streams. 40 million of us hunt and
fish. Teenagers in isolated rural
communities play tennis on public courts, or learn to swim in public pools,
built with LWCF money in the 1980’s. In urban Los Angeles, a future soccer star is learning to kick a ball
downfield, in a park paid for by the LWCF. In a small Montana town, there’s a
thriving fishing tackle shop and guide service that would not exist without the
fishing access sites bought with LWCF money.
(for a list of LWCF projects across the US- http://www.lwcfcoalition.org/ )

Americans have come to view such opportunities as their
birthright, and to expect that they will always be there for us and our
children.

But there is no chance that these extraordinary luxuries can
continue without the active involvement of the citizens who enjoy them. At a
time when our population is expected to reach anywhere from 450- 500 million by
2050, the environmental laws, and programs like the LWCF, are under siege by
the minions of a new breed of would-be plutocrats.

These same minions lay siege to what has become a powerhouse
outdoor recreation industry: 6.1 million jobs, $646 billion in outdoor
recreation spending each year, $39.9 billion in federal tax revenue, and $39.7
billion in state/local tax revenue. http://www.outdoorindustry.org/pdf/OIA_OutdoorRecEconomyReport2012.pdf
. They lay siege to a basic American idea, best said by Theodore Roosevelt in
Chicago, 1912: "This country will
not be a permanently good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a
reasonably good place for all of us to live in."

It has been said that America is the only nation where
educated men and women who would not for one week let their children breathe
the air of Beijing or drink the water of Mumbai, lobby relentlessly to get rid
of the very laws that prevent such pollution from being the norm here. There
are tens of millions of Americans who enjoy clean air, water, the LWCF-funded
parks and public lands and the world’s best public hunting and fishing and seem
to have no idea why they have these things, when so much of the rest of the
world does not. That is exactly why, in July of 2013, the US. House of
Representatives Interior Appropriations Subcommittee felt that there would be
no uproar from the public when they voted to zero out the budgets for:

That same obliviousness among most citizens is why the Land
and Water Conservation Fund has been raided, year after year by unscrupulous
elected representatives, so that in most years, even as offshore production
revenues soared and coffers were full, over 70% of the LWCF has been stolen.
Those who took these funds (to date, $17 billion has been taken) were sure that
the citizens would never notice- it’s difficult, after all, to prove a
negative, the sick children who would have been well had they had a park to
play in, the floods and water pollution that occurred because there was no
money to purchase greenbelts along the urban creeks, the sporting goods that
were never sold to the people who never had a place to use them. The inmate who
could have been a fisheries biologist or the military career that never
happened because the teenager did not know how to swim and could not run a
mile. http://cdn.missionreadiness.org/MR_Too_Fat_to_Fight-1.pdf

While too many of us – especially the hunters and fishermen
with the most at stake- remain unaware, there is a growing constituency of Americans
who understand the importance of the LWCF. Among them, Montana Senator Max Baucus
(recently appointed US ambassador to China) and the 38 of his colleagues who
so-sponsored Senate 338, the bill that will reauthorize LWCF, mandate that it
be funded to its full $900 million extent and make sure those funds are never
again looted. Among those colleagues is Montana Senator Jon Tester, who has
long been a champion of the LWCF, seen here with Randy Newberg, the host of the
sportsmen’s show Own your Own Adventures, in one of the best short discussions
of this issue:

One of the most powerful advocates is the Land and Water
Conservation Fund Coalition, comprised of nearly one thousand conservation
groups, businesses and sportsmen’s groups, ranging from the Annapolis Bicycle
Racing Team to the World Wildlife Fund and beyond. http://www.lwcfcoalition.org/about-us.html

Among those diverse interests is LWCF Coalition member and
veteran Mark Starr, Program Director of the Veteran’s Voice. For Starr, support
of the LWCF is part of a very personal mission: “We get veterans outdoors and
expose them to the healing qualities of nature, and we work to protect the
natural landscapes that we use and love. This is as much an urban issue as it
is anything else. I live in the concrete bunker of Los Angeles, and LWCF has
paid for ball fields, swimming pools, parks, none of which would be available
to the people here without that funding. We bring the issue of the LWCF to the
table every single time we meet with lawmakers.” In a recent blog post, Starr
wrote about the difficulty so many soldiers have in readjusting to civilian
life, “Many veterans find healing during this transition by spending time in
the outdoors fishing, hiking, hunting and camping with family and friends.
That's why it's personally important for me and many veterans that we protect
public lands in our state and our nation. These are the lands that we fought to
defend. They represent the great majesty of our country and the boundless
opportunity of the American dream.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-starr/

Bill Sells, of the Maryland-based trade group the Sports and
Fitness Industry Association, says that the debate over healthcare has
broadened the support and understanding of the need for the LWCF, in ways that
should have been obvious, but were not.
“What the debate brought to light was the true cost of a sedentary
nation, paying for these entirely preventable illnesses, for people’s entire
lives. No nation can afford that. And we know that the best way to address
these costs is for people to just be active.
That’s how we get healthier.” To be active, Sells says, people need
access to open spaces and public lands and outdoor infrastructure, “and the
LWCF is a major component of that. That was the intention behind the LWCF in
the beginning, and we need it more than ever now.”

We have always faced extraordinary questions. Consistently,
we have answered them with extraordinary engagement. Not for us, we have said,
the concrete slums crowded with hungry children, the rivers awash with trash,
the abandonment of hunting and fishing and its attendant freedoms and knowledge
of the true value of the earth. Not for
us, extremism, plutocracy, stupidity, illness. Societal and economic collapse makes excellent
fodder for movies and books, but it’s a poor place to track elk or teach children
to climb trees and swim rivers. We know the answers to the questions this time,
too: healthy public lands and spaces, clean air, water and wildlife and fish,
room to explore and to learn the nature of the gifts we’ve been given. If we
are as engaged as those Americans who came before us, we’ll meet our challenges
as they met theirs.